Passage
of a mandatory electronic filing law
for state legislators, plus a number
of improvements to its disclosure web
site, improved Hawaii’s overall grade to
a B and placed the state’s campaign
finance disclosure program among the top
five in the country.
Hawaii’s
disclosure law requires candidates to
report detailed information about contributors
giving at least $100, but occupation
and employer is disclosed only for major
donors. The strongest
areas of the law are disclosure of expenditures,
independent expenditures, and loan details;
last-minute independent expenditures must
be reported prior to Election Day. The
state legislature passed a bill in May
2005 to require electronic filing for legislative
candidates, after years of attempts to
enhance the state’s electronic filing
law (statewide candidates have had to file
electronically since 1997.) The change
bumps the state’s e-filing grade
from a D to an A+. The new law does include
a waiver provision, and one big question
will be how strictly or loosely that provision
is implemented.
The
Campaign Spending Commission’s
web site offers both scanned filings and
searchable databases of contributions and
expenditures, and the percentage of candidates
whose reports are searchable should increase
markedly in the next election. Unfortunately,
case sensitivity is still a big problem
in the databases, and at least needs to
be explained to site visitors, if not fixed.
For example, searching one statewide
candidate’s
records for contributors by occupation “attorney” returns
no records, but searching for “Attorney” with
a capital “A” returns over
100 contributions totaling $162,000. Hopefully
this and other technical problems will
be addressed before the 2006 election year.
Hawaii
made a number of significant improvements
to its disclosure web site that are reflected
in a higher rank (from 39 to 21) and grade
in the web site usability category. The
site now includes summary amounts raised
and spent by all candidates, an explanation
of the differences between the HERTS1 and
HERTS2 databases, lists of candidates,
and improved terminology. Having
added many great resources to the site,
Hawaii can now work on improving the organization
of the information; usability testers expressed
some confusion and lack of confidence in
the site, and gave it overall low marks
for navigability and usability.
→ Quick
Fix: Add a set
of technical instructions for the
searchable databases, including
a prominently displayed notice
about case sensitivity.
♦ Editor’s
Pick: Receipts
and Disbursements Totals for statewide
and legislative candidates, and Receipts
and Disbursements Analysis for 1994-2004. View image
